Rivet Logic Blogs

Month: March 2011

Last year, a survey conducted by Accenture revealed that a majority of organizations anticipated increased investment in open source software this year. To further reinforce this notion of increasing open source software (OSS) usage, a recent survey by Gartner found that more than half of the organizations surveyed have adopted OSS solutions as part of their IT strategy. Over the past five years, each of Gartner’s OSS surveys taken have reflected an increase in the amount of OSS that makes up responding organizations’ portfolio, from less than 10% five years ago to more than an expected 30% within the next 18 months. Not surprisingly, the rate of proprietary software has decreased at about the same rate as OSS usage has increased.

Similar to the Accenture survey, which stated reasons beyond cost savings benefits that make OSS seem attractive, the Gartner survey yielded analogous responses in which respondents cited benefits of flexibility, increased innovation, shorter development times and faster procurement processes as reasons for adopting OSS solutions.

“Gaining a competitive advantage has emerged as a significant reason for adopting an OSS solution, suggesting that users are beginning to look at OSS differently — if they can customize the code to make it unique to their company, they have created a competitive advantage,” said Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner.

The survey also sheds light on some other aspects of how OSS is being used, including key initiatives supported by the use of OSS and how OSS components are used in conjunction with internally developed software to enhance existing systems.

CMSWire’s topic of focus for this month is enterprise collaboration. It touches on a variety of important topics that organizations should consider before implementing an enterprise collaboration tool.

One point that struck me as particularly interesting is that collaboration starts offline with the people and not with the technology platform. It seems like this is an important factor that can easily be overlooked by many organizations during the process of determining a collaboration solution. As the article indicates, it’s important for an organization to realize its own work place culture and select tools that build on what they already do. For example, a wiki solution may be a better fit for a small team of collaborators than a full enterprise collaboration platform, which may be overkill. In essence, “this existing culture should be thought of as a blueprint for a collaboration system”.

Along similar lines, it’s also important for an organization to determine what they want to achieve with enterprise collaboration before implementing a solution. Collaboration requirements for a departmental team may be different than enterprise-wide collaboration goals. The technology will always be readily available, but without the proper analysis, a solution may not be implemented in the most optimal way to achieve the desired results.

“As is the case with each of the companies, inclusion is based on the breath and impact of their innovations and on the value they provide to the entire constituency chain. Any list such as this is a work in progress, and so it is with this one. We’re always on the lookout for groundbreaking new solutions or elegant modifications to existing ones.”

The knowledge management industry is constantly evolving and we are honored to be recognized again for our innovative solutions that help drive successful open source adoption. Other companies on this list include Alfresco and Lucid Imagination, among others.